Creative extigy on Mac OS X doesn’t support 5.1 surround sound

I ordered a few cables to get both my PC and powerbook hooked up to my old creative extigy sound card, hoping I could then listen to either through my 5.1 speaker set.

I’d used the extigy on the mac before, and it certainly does detect it and play sound. Unfortunately I hadn’t paid much attention to the rear speakers. It turns out creative never released any drivers for the mac, so not only can I not get proper 5.1 surround sound, the CMSS feature won’t work either.

So that was a waste of time and money, considering I can get the same sound from a normal stereo cable. Apparently the newer macbooks (hopefully mine included) have optical audio out, but I’m not sure I want to buy the cable to find out?

As a “sort of” fix, I’m going to play music using parallels running Windows XP. I don’t think I’m ever going to get away from Windows for good. 🙁

Hey, I wanted to use the extigy sound card as well for my mac mini, bought at the end of 2008, it worked fine, but after I upgraded my os x to 10.5.7, the extigy card does not appear in the sound settings in my system preferences, now i have to use the digital out, but I can then only control the speakers manually from the controller that followed my speakers. I have four speakers and a sub, and to get the rear speakers to work, I used a connector for two audio outputs from the extigy, so it plays the same sound in all 4 speakers, not the ideal solution, but, hey, I can’t let two speakers collect dust. But back to my problem, do you know if it’s possible to rollback the os x update, just to check that it might be why I can see the extigy card in my system preferences? Thanks

Good question – I was thinking of doing the same. I’ve got a Macbook Pro from 2008 and from what I read a few months ago, this should work fine, as its all over optical. This is assuming 5.1 is sent out on the optical feed, but why wouldn’t it?

You wouldn’t need the USB connection and you shouldn’t need an amplifier. I guess that might depend on your speaker setup, but if its a bog standard speaker set, that you’d normally plug straight in to your pc or something, no amplifier would be needed.

Great news! I got it to work!
I did install a program called: Soundflowerbed. To be able to control iTunes volume with my keyboard.
When playing music i put my logitech set on 50% of the sound and with movies 100%, because it just isnt loud enough for me, but hey, thats not a big problem 😛

Dolby Surround for the win 😀

I’m so glad this works. Im just thinking of buying an universal remote so that i can use just one instead of two,.

Yeah just like I said…
You need to install soundflowerbed, and select that in your system preferences under sound output.
And when you then want to have real 5,1 on dvds and stuff. open dvd-player and go to preferences and set the output to Digital output.
When you’re done watching the movie, just restart soundflower bed, and you are good to go..

Ohyeah. soundflowerbed I use with these settings : 16Ch -> built in out-put.
And channel 1 to 5 on output [1]
..